Tuesday, April 26, 2011

#282 Robin Black: Growing Up Unhappy and Becoming Happier in a Way that Makes Unhappy People Feel Like They Can Become Happier Too

Robin Black was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the youngest of three children. Her parents were legal scholars and she grew up in a great big house that was not a bit fancy. The house had lots of illness around it, which made growing up pretty odd. When Robin was 10, her grandmother who was a paraplegic from spinal tumors moved in with the family. Also, her father’s difficult moods dominated the household and his lack of balance kept everybody off-balance. Robin had ADD (still does) and other learning issues, which made her feel like a failure growing up. She was always the kid with unfinished homework and she missed lots of school because of illnesses, which had their basis in her fear of going to school. When Robin was 16, she asked her parents if she could go into therapy and that probably saved her life. She’s thankful for that instinct to get help when life felt so overwhelming. Robin’s memories of childhood are largely unhappy ones, but she always liked reading and writing, and she loved theater. She was in every school play and some community theater too. Playing a character was a great way to not deal with her own stuff. Robin studied voice too and can sing just about every song written between the two world wars. If she wasn’t going to be an actress, she was going to be a nightclub singer. But she didn’t pursue either, in part, because she was afraid of how sophisticated the other theater kids seemed when she got to college. That paralyzed her and she took German instead, which made no sense at all. During college, Robin took time off to return home and be her grandmother’s caregiver. After college, she became severely agoraphobic and couldn’t leave her house without having crippling anxiety attacks. During this time, Robin also had two difficult pregnancy losses, one late along, and those were shattering experiences. Robin met her wonderful husband Richard at a Public Service Fair when she was in law school, which she was doing so she could support herself and her kids. She was 30ish, had ended her first marriage, and was a mother of two children. Richard has been a full-fledged parent to her two older kids and to the daughter they have together. She’s amazed by how much he can give to other people. Around 40, Robin decided agoraphobia wouldn’t get in her way anymore. It took years of intensely difficult work, but she beat the disease. Most of the decisions Robin made the first 40 years of her life were motivated by fear. Robin’s kids are now 23, 19, 15 (girl, boy, girl) each amazing and amazingly kind. Her daughters are gamer girls and her son is a singer, which makes her super happy. Her youngest has significant learning disabilities and works so hard for things that come easily to most. The learning disabilities concern language processing, so Robin and her daughter are always trying to find the right words, though for very different reasons. Along with her family, Robin also loves her dog Watson, who is so loving back. It's important to have a relationship that doesn't involve words. For now, Robin wants to keep writing, to age well, and have friends who think she’s kind and funny, which she does. She wants to write a book about growing up unhappy and becoming happier that makes unhappy people feel like they can become happier. She also wants to sing more, but not in some corny, metaphorical way. She actually wants to sing more.

Nice Things About Us

Time Out London: “A deep love between an ageing husband and wife is given a heartbreaking voice ... tender and poignant”

El País: “Haunting and awesome ... beautiful and intense ... This is a novel from a great talent.”

Nice Things About Us

Observer: “Powerful and moving ... breathless”

El Placer de la Lectura: “A monument to love”

The Glasgow Herald: “Be warned: this book has the power to make even the most hard-hearted of readers shed a tear. ... Kimball has broken into new territory: Us is one of the most graphic depictions of illness and loss I have ever read.”

Letras Libres: Michael Kimball "already delivers the future of the novel ... [He is] one of the authentic innovators in contemporary fiction."

Blake Butler: “There are two books I can remember that ever made me physically cry. There were the rape scenes in Saramago’s Blindness, and there was nearly every chapter of Michael Kimball’s [Us]. While the first hurt because it was so brutal, Kimball’s was a softer kind of invocation—as I read it in a bathtub, I could not shake the feeling of being held, as if somehow the words had interlaced my skin. This is the essence of the magic Michael Kimball holds—his sentences come on so taut, so right there, and yet somehow so calming, it’s as if you are being visited by some lighted presence.”

El Razón: “Bathed in tenderness ... touching and breathtaking ... one of the most moving, heartbreaking, and sad novels of contemporary American fiction. It is essential.”

Telegraph and Argus: “This is the saddest book I have ever read and one of the most beautiful ... One can’t help being aware of his grief and the great love he feels for his dying wife. It will make you cry and break your heart but this is one book you must read.”

60 Writers/60 Places

I Will Smash You

Nice Things on Dear Everybody

The Believer: "a curatorial masterpiece"

The LA Times: "funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking"

Time Out New York: "stunning"

The Star-Democrat: "elegantly and eloquently written ... an unforgettable book"

Gary Lutz: “Dear Everybody confirms Kimball's reputation as one of our most supremely gifted and virtuosic renderers of the human predicament.”

Largehearted Boy: "Dear Everybody is a cleverly constructed book that balances pathos and humor exquisitely, and proves Michael Kimball to be a master storyteller."

The Citizen: "superb"

WYPR: “quite a literary feat"

The Faster Times: "Michael Kimball is a badass."

HTMLGIANT: "Dear Everybody is one of the finest, most heartbreaking books I’ve ever read."

David McLendon: "I know of no one ... who knows and understands every cog and flywheel and screw of the language machine to the degree of Kimball's reach."

Word Riot: Dear Everybody is "forever embedded in my brain."

Maud Casey: “Dear Everybody has the page-turning urgency of a mystery and the thrilling formal inventiveness of the great epistolary novels.”

HTMLGIANT: "one of the hottest, most innovative books of the year"

Words

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Nice Things About BIG RAY

Sam Lipsyte: “Michael Kimball has been writing innovative, compelling, and beautifully felt books for years, but BIG RAY seems a break-through and culmination all at once. It's funny and terrifying and it's his masterpiece, at least so far.”

Dana Spiotta: “Big Ray, the man, made an indelible human impression on me. BIG RAY, Michael Kimball's terrific new novel, is genuinely moving because it is so rigorously unsentimental. Kimball is a powerful and courageous writer.”

Jon McGregor: "BIG RAY, a slim and finely-toned book about an overweight ruin of a father, is an uncompromising work of power and grace. I finished reading it a week ago, but I still can't put it down."

Deb Olin Unferth: "Elegy, meditation, story, final reckoning—whatever you want to call it, BIG RAY is mesmerizing. Sorrowful and honest, the kind of book that compels, not compromises, BIG RAY is an incredible accomplishment."

Madison Smartt Bell: “BIG RAY is disturbing in the most extraordinary ways, and in the end extraordinarily touching also. There’s nothing quite like it I’ve ever read till now (though there were times I thought the ghost of Barry Hannah was whispering in my ear.) It’s amazing what a deep resonance a writer of Michael Kimball’s quality can strike with a very few words.”

Jessica Anya Blau: BIG RAY is stunning, haunting, and beautiful. This groundbreaking and unforgettable novel should not be missed.

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About Me

Michael Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls "a curatorial masterpiece") and, most recently, Us (which Time Out Chicago calls "a simply gorgeous and astonishing book"). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Bomb, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated into a dozen languages—including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and two documentary films, I Will Smash You and 60 Writers/60 Places. His new novel, Big Ray, will be published by Bloomsbury in Fall 2012.